Desktop cut-sheet laser printers have been commonly used in the retail pharmacy industry to print scripts (i.e., booklets or pamphlets) in support of prescription fills. Processing these documents is time consuming, wasteful and unreliable using the cut-sheet laser printers, as sheet skew, page jams, and mis-feeds are common problems associated with the cut-sheet laser printers, especially when printing in duplex mode, (i.e., on both sides of the sheet). In addition, the cut-sheet desktop laser printers typically rely upon fixed-length sheets (e.g., letter size—8½″×11″ and legal size—8½″×14″) to print variable amounts of data. As such, fixed-length sheets usually have a limited amount of space available for variable data printing. This necessarily leads to an increase in sheet consumption, as full sheets are used to print partial amounts of data. Finally, as the sheets for each script and for the scripts of the different prescription fills are printed on separate sheets, there is a great possibility for misplacement and loss of the sheets, as well as increase in probability that the sheets may end up in the wrong hands. The latter is of concern as the scripts may contain personal and/or confidential information.
Direct thermal printers are used in many applications. Often, information is provided or printed only on one side of a document or a receipt. Dual-sided direct thermal printing of documents, such as transaction documents and receipts, is described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,784,906 and 6,759,366. In dual-sided direct thermal printing, the printer is configured to allow concurrent printing on both sides of a thermal media moving along a feed path through the thermal printer. In such a printer, a direct thermal print head is disposed on each side of the thermal media along the feed path. In operation, each thermal print head faces an opposing platen across the thermal media from the respective print head. During printing, the opposing print heads selectively apply heat to the opposing sides of the thermal media, which comprises a substrate with a thermally sensitive coating on each of the opposing surfaces of the substrate. The coating changes color when heat is applied, such that printing is provided on the coated substrate.
As the reliability and efficiency of script printing are of critical importance in pharmacy applications, there is a need in the art for providing a dual-sided thermal media and a dual-sided thermal printer to image pharmacy scripts.